IBMs new experimental atomic-scale magnet memory is at least 100 times denser than conventional memory
Scientists from IBM Research (NYSE: IBM) have successfully demonstrated the ability to store information in as few as 12 magnetic atoms. This is significantly less than today's disk drives, which use about one million atoms to store a single bit of information. The ability to manipulate matter by its most basic components – atom by atom – could lead to the vital understanding necessary to build smaller, faster and more energy-efficient devices.
It is crucial however that Windows 8 tablets take off in a big way and sell in the millions, the reason for this is that Microsoft have re-engineered Windows directly around tablets, effectively betting the entire platform on the success of these devices that will probably only ever form 10% of the whole computing market.
A Brief History Of Web Standards [Infographic] - Data Visualization Encyclopedia, Information Technology, Symbols, Posters, Infographic
Throughout the history of the Internet, there has been an evolution of web standards. Due to these transformations, today, "the number of devices connected to the Internet exceeds the number of people on Earth." Vitamin Talent has collaborated with Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman, founders of An Event Apart, to create this fantastic infographic detailing the changes of web standards during the lifetime of the Internet.
Why Skyrim Is Horrible for the Economy | GeekDad | Wired.com
We live in very troubled times. Unemployment is higher than it has been in a generation and job numbers continue to be dismal; the stock market turbulently boils, destroying billions in wealth; and entire continents look to the rest of the world for bailouts. Still, there are pockets of economic hope. After a very positive October, video game sales continued to increase in November. During the week following Thanksgiving, XBox had its biggest week of hardware sales ever, moving nearly one million consoles.
Yet, in this period of bullish video game sales, there is some decidedly bad news. There is one game that is leaving a black eye on the gaming industry and single-handedly keeping us in a recession. Released one month ago, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim has done more to damage our economy than a committee of congressmen with a wallet full of US Treasury credit cards and a case of whiskey.
I know what you're thinking: it's the second-best selling game in the world right now. In the first 48 hours that Skyrim was available, 3.5 million copies were sold, a number that has continued to grow. How can a game that will generate millions possibly be bad for the economy?
The answer is quite simple: Skyrim is incredible. The game's world is so big and there are so many quests to complete that those millions of dollars in sales are being nullified by players' lost productivity and lack of economic participation in the real world.
Read on at: http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/12/skyrim/
Owning A Cat a biological hazard that could Void Your Computer Warranty? - The Consumerist
After 3 weeks of HP support-hell, I finally reached someone who could give me a little info on why my laptop wasn't repaired...Cat hair or not, I just want my computer fixed. It's a manufacturing defect, and it just so happens that the laptop is sprinkled with a bit of hair.
Anyway, I kept arguing with him about how that was really not a lot of cat hair. He told me that it was "covered" and that he was positive that the computer had overheated (multiple reps told me the same thing). I knew it was all a lie, I was looking at the same photos he was, and there was hardly any hair in there. I kept saying that, and I told him the computer cooled itself fine.
He seemed to relent later, and he pretty much agreed with me, so he talked to his supervisor (to make an appeal). Then he gets back on the phone with me and says that the supervisor said that there was SO MUCH cat hair that it's considered a biological hazard. That's absolutely ridiculous, and he wouldn't even give me the number for his supervisor or transfer me to him (why not?).
I probably have more cat hair on my shirt than what was in the laptop. Am I a walking "biological hazard"? I don't think so. Why don't they lock me up and throw me in jail for sending such a dangerous computer into HP's service center?
Read the awesome at: http://consumerist.com/2011/12/cat-hair-in-hp-computer-means-no-repair-for-you.html
Social Media Facts Every Communications Person Needs to Know - OhMyGov News
ohmygov...composed this list of impactful factoids about social media.
Our Top 10:
1. The average Facebook session lasts 37 minutes.
2. The average Twitter user logs on for 23 minutes.
3. More than 400 million people log on to Facebook daily.
4. There are > 1 billion social network users worldwide.
5. 38 percent of Internet users have a smart phone. They are more intensive users of social media than those without a smart phone.
6. Out of 7 billion people in the world, 2 billion have internet access.
7. Of emerging markets, India and Brazil show the highest awareness of social media.
8. 510,000 comments are uploaded to Facebook every minute.
9. 93 percent of social network users have no intention of stopping their use of social media.
10. Over 60 percent of social network users state they have no desire to change or add a new social network.
More Facts:
Windows 8 will be 'largely irrelevant' on PCs, predicts IDC - Computerworld
Computerworld - Windows 8 will be "largely irrelevant" to traditional PC users, a research firm said Monday.
Microsoft faces a tough sell with the new operating system, IDC said, because Windows 8 tries to "offer the best of both worlds" with a single OS suitable for both desktops and tablets.
"Windows 8 will be largely irrelevant to the users of traditional PCs, and we expect effectively no upgrade activity from Windows 7 to Windows 8 in that form factor," said IDC.
Read on by Gregg Keizer: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9222436/Windows_8_will_be_largely_irrelevant_on_PCs_predicts_IDC
U.S. tech employment nears its all-time high - Computerworld
Computerworld - The U.S. government's report today that the unemployment rate is down and hiring is up showed some good news for tech workers as well.
The tech industry added 7,100 jobs last month, an increase of .17% from the previous month, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data analyzed by the TechServe Alliance, an industry group that tracks labor data month to month.
This brings the overall employment number for the industry to 4.068 million, which represents a year over year gain of 2.1%.
Tech industry employment is nearing the all-time high of 4.088 million, which was set in June, 2008, according to TechServe.
Internet Explorer Users Are Kinda Stupid...
a "psychometric consulting" firm that provides hiring exams for businesses, gave online IQ tests to more than 100,000 people. Visitors arrived either through organic searches or through advertisements on other sites, and Aptiquant made a note of which browser each test taker was using.
On average, Internet Explorer users fared the worst, with IE6 users at the bottom of the pile and IE8 users performing slightly better. Firefox, Chrome and Safari fell in the middle with little difference between them. IE with Chrome Frame and Camino landed on top, along with Opera, whose users scored the highest (on average).
"The study showed a substantial relationship between an individual's cognitive ability and their choice of web browser," AptiQuant concluded. "From the test results, it is a clear indication that individuals on the lower side of the IQ scale tend to resist a change/upgrade of their browsers."
Massive botnet 'indestructible,' say researchers - TDL-4
Computerworld - A new and improved botnet that has infected more than four million PCs is "practically indestructible," security researchers say.
"TDL-4," the name for both the bot Trojan that infects machines and the ensuing collection of compromised computers, is "the most sophisticated threat today," said Kaspersky Labs researcher Sergey Golovanov in a detailed analysis Monday.
"[TDL-4] is practically indestructible," Golovanov said.
The Government's Gadget Habit
"The Federal procurement database reveals millions of dollars are being spent on gadgets. Over the past 10 years, the US government has spent $117 million on BlackBerries (including service plans), almost $18 million on iOS devices, about $1 million on PS3s, over $500k on Xboxes, and somehow, $12k on Zunes." - SlashDot
Is This the Golden Age of Hacking?
"With a seemingly continuous wave of attacks hitting the public and commercial sectors, there has never been a more prodigious period for hackers, argues PC Pro. What has led to the sudden hacking boom? Ease of access to tools has also led to an explosion in the numbers of people actively looking for companies with weakened defenses, according to security experts. Meanwhile, the recession has left thousands of highly skilled IT staff out of work and desperate for money, while simultaneously crimping companies' IT security budgets. The pressure to get systems up and running as quickly as possible also means that networks aren't locked down as tightly as they should be, which can leave back doors open for hackers." - SlashDot
LulzSec reveals massive Sony security breach
LulzSec hacks Sony Pictures, reveals 1m passwords unguarded HTML clipboard
Sony was embarrassed again on Thursday after Lulz Security posted that it had successfully hacked Sony Pictures' website. It lived up to its earlier promise and used a basic SQL injection attack to expose one million users' personal data, 3.5 million digital coupons and 75,000 music codes. The hacking team found that the information had few defenses and that none of the data, even including passwords, were stored in clear text.
Not all of the information could be taken due to resources and time, LulzSec said. As evidence, though, it posted a selection of what it had as evidence, including databases for related sites like AutoTrader, the coupons and codes, and the plain login information for some of the database. Administrator data was compromised both at the US site as well as from Belgium and the Netherlands.
LulzSec, which doesn't pursue hacks for commercial gain, cast itself as doing both Sony and the public as a favor. The move would push Sony to lock down its security more thoroughly across its sites. For end users, it was a warning as to how easily compromised Sony's sites were even after the PSN hack and several follow-ups from different sources.
"From a single injection, we accessed EVERYTHING," the team said. "Why do you put such faith in a company that allows itself to become open to these simple attacks?"
Sony hadn't responded to the breach as of Thursday but was ironically due to testify at a Congress hearing the same day on its security practices
What the Fark?
Here are funny measurements that some people actually use.
1 Wheaton = 500,000 Twitter followers
iPad eliminating thousands of American jobs.
"on an anti-technology rant on Friday on the floor of Congress, 
blaming the iPad for eliminating thousands of American jobs. '
Why do you need to go to Borders anymore?' asked Jackson.
'Why do you need to go to Barnes & Noble?
Buy an iPad, download your book, download your newspaper, download your magazine.'
'What becomes of publishing companies and publishing company jobs?
And what becomes of bookstores and librarians and all of the jobs associated with paper?
Well, in the not too distant future, such jobs simply will not exist.
Steve Jobs is doing pretty well. He's created the iPad.
Certainly, it has made life more efficient for Americans, but the iPad is produced in China.
It is not produced here in the United States."
Splinternet, Or How We Broke the Good Old Web
SlashDot - "I don't want to be that scruffy guy with 'The end is nigh' sign and some really bad dental problems, but most industry analysts already noticed that global Internet is coming apart, changing into a cluster of smaller and more closed webs. They have even created a catchy name for this Web 3.0 – the Splinternet.
New kind of quantum public key cryptography - Wooohooo!
"Public key cryptography allows anybody to encrypt a message using a public key but only those with another private key can decrypt the message. That's possible because of certain mathematical functions that are easy to perform in one direction but hard to do in reverse. The most famous example is multiplication. It's easy to multiply two numbers together to get a third but hard to start with the third number and work out its factors. Now Japanese researchers have discovered a quantum problem that is hard to solve in one direction but easy to do in reverse. This asymmetry, they say, could form the basis of a new kind of quantum public key cryptography. Their system is based on the problem of distinguishing between two ensembles of quantum states. This is similar to the problem of determining whether two graphs are identical, ie whether they correspond vertex-for-vertex and edge-for-edge. Increasing the complexity of the graph can always make this problem practically impossible for a quantum computer to solve in a reasonable time. But knowing the structure of a subset of the graph makes this problem easy, so this acts as a kind of private key for decrypting messages."
DOA - SysAdmins
The Decline and Fall of System Administration"Deep End's Paul Venezia questions whether server virtualization technologies are contributing to the decline of real server administration skills, as more and more sysadmins argue in favor of re-imaging as a solution to Unix server woes.
'This has always been the (many times undeserved) joke about clueless Windows admins: They have a small arsenal of possible fixes, and once they've exhausted the supply, they punt and rebuild the server from scratch rather than dig deeper. On the Unix side of the house, that concept has been met with derision since the dawn of time, but as Linux has moved into the mainstream — and the number of marginal Linux admins has grown — those ideas are suddenly somehow rational.'"
Internet Kill Switch is Easy, just ask Gates
Register When US TV anchor Katie Couric asked the Microsoft co-founder and chairman if he was surprised that Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak could take the unprecedented step of killing the entire Egyptian internet, Gates responded with an emphatic: "no".
"It's not that hard to shut the Internet down if you have military power where you can tell people that's what's going to happen," Gates said. "Whenever you do something extraordinary like that you're sort of showing people you're afraid of the truth getting out, so it's a very difficult tactic, but certainly it can be shut off."
The majority ISPs Internet connectivity from the rest of the world comes from a small group of backbone pipes....
"If you want people to stay at home and do nothing, why don't you turn the internet back on?" - Conan O'Brien
Facebook and Twitter The Pathological Problem
Twitter and Facebook don't connect people – they isolate them from reality...
Guardian The way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness, according to a leading American sociologist.
"A behaviour that has become typical may still express the problems that once caused us to see it as pathological," MIT professor Sherry Turkle writes in her new book, Alone Together, which is leading an attack on the information age.
Turkle's book, published in the UK next month, has caused a sensation in America, which is usually more obsessed with the merits of social networking. She appeared last week on Stephen Colbert's late-night comedy show, The Colbert Report. When Turkle said she had been at funerals where people checked their iPhones, Colbert quipped: "We all say goodbye in our own way."
Turkle's thesis is simple: technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.
Social networking under fresh attack as tide of cyber-scepticism sweeps US
The list of attacks on social media is a long one and comes from all corners of academia and popular culture. A recent bestseller in the US, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr, suggested that use of the internet was altering the way we think to make us less capable of digesting large and complex amounts of information, such as books and magazine articles. The book was based on an essay that Carr wrote in the Atlantic magazine.
It was just as emphatic and was headlined: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Another strand of thought in the field of cyber-scepticism is found in The Net Delusion, by Evgeny Morozov. He argues that social media has bred a generation of "slacktivists". It has made people lazy and enshrined the illusion that clicking a mouse is a form of activism equal to real world donations of money and time.
Other books include The Dumbest Generation by Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein – in which he claims "the intellectual future of the US looks dim"– and We Have Met the Enemy by Daniel Akst, which describes the problems of self-control in the modern world, of which the proliferation of communication tools is a key component.
Turkle's book, however, has sparked the most debate so far. It is a cri de coeur for putting down the BlackBerry, ignoring Facebook and shunning Twitter. "We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us," she writes... the social media generation, suggesting that Facebook was created by people who failed to fit in with the real world.
Is this creating the uncivil culture that has no empathy?
Fellow critics point to numerous incidents to back up their argument. Recently, media coverage of the death in Brighton of Simone Back focused on a suicide note she had posted on Facebook that was seen by many of her 1,048 "friends" on the site. Yet none called for help – instead they traded insults with each other on her Facebook wall. Read on at Guardian
Computer Virus's Turn 25
"Happy anniversary Brain Virus, the first bit of malware capable of infecting a DOS-based PC. Back in those relatively innocent times, the brothers actually embedded their real names and business address in the code and later told Time magazine they had written the virus to protect their medical software from piracy. Who knows what they were really thinking, but by all accounts the Brain Virus was relatively harmless. Twenty-five years later, most malware is anything but benign and cyber criminals pull off exploits the Alvi brothers never envisioned."
Read more of this story at Slashdot
Tweet Age Wasteland... world of the web
- 107 trillion emails were sent
- 89% of that email was spam.
- Domain Names: Over 202 million are already taken. *
- There are 1.97 billion internet users in the world. That's 14% more than last year. Asia has 825 million, Europe has 475 million, North America has 266 million.
- There are 152 million blogs
- There were 25 billion tweets sent.
- Facebook had 600 million members.
GOV on Facebook
"Congress was broadcast live on Facebook for the first time in history. Now you can waste time and not get work done by watching Congress waste time and not get work done." —Jimmy Fallon
Hope for Change in Microsoft
Apparently MS is getting tired of getting kicked around by IOS and Android... Can they catch up at this point?
CES: Microsoft Hacks Up Next OS as SOC
With the Pre-CES Keynote made by [Steve Ballmer], the announcement came that the next iteration of their operating system being available in SOC specific form. This will lead to windows being able to run a very diverse hardware set in a much more efficient manner than it does right now. Microsoft displayed 4 different versions of what the next generation prototypes are from 4 different manufacturers but there has been no work done yet on the GUI for SOC as [Ballmer] was very clear to mention that more than a couple of times.
The picture below is Intel's iteration of System on a Chip.
How you can't avoid online tracking....
Where ever, where ever you are... I will follow
Even after you set your browser to delete existing cookies and ban new ones, download super-cookies and use the tools created by pro-privacy programmers, there's one data-gathering technique that you simply cannot avoid. Your computer has hundreds of settings that control things like the main interface language (English, Korean, etc.), sound and screen resolution settings, and the color schemes people set for their Microsoft Word documents.How to avoid online tracking. (Hint: you can't.)As you scroll the Internet, most websites automatically take snapshots of your settings. That information, combined with data on where you connect to the internet, can be used to track your movements around the web and build a profile about each visitor. To see how effective this is at tracing individual users, I ran a test designed by Eckerseley called Panopticlick on my own computer. I've only had this computer for about a month, so I haven't even taken the time to open my control panel and customize the settings for the track pad, keyboard, screen, etc. (The program doesn't search for computers or beacons on your computer.)
Nevertheless, Panopticlick found 20 bits of identifying information on my Mac. Using those bits, it could tell that I was a unique user and not one of the 1.3 million people who ran the test before me.
FCC approves controversial ‘Net Neutrality’ regulations
RawStory - Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), who has championed "Net Neutrality" in the
past, said the FCC's proposed rules would actually "destroy" the principle of "Net Neutrality."The rules authored by FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski would require ISPs to allow their customers to have access all legal online content, applications and services over their wired networks and prohibit unreasonable network discrimination.
But the plan would also allow for a greater fractioning of the Internet and data rationing on mobile and wired networks, according to analysis of the policies. Major network stakeholders like Verizon and AT&T would be able to sell bandwidth in capped tiers, with overage charges for users who download too much information, and certain types of data traffic like peer-to-peer file transfers could be banned altogether.
If they pass and telecoms are allowed to move forward with their plans, "the Internet as we know it would cease to exist," Sen. Franken concluded in an editorial published by Huffington Post.
"The FCC will be meeting to discuss those regulations, and we must make sure that its members understand that allowing corporations to control the Internet is simply unacceptable." Read more at RawStory
WTF has a new meaning Zuckerberg
Society FAIL - Zuckerberg, TIME Magazine's Person of the Year
WTF!... Welcome To Facebook
new cloud computing looks like a plan "to push people into careless computing"
Guardian...making extensive use of cloud computing was "worse than stupidity" because it meant a loss of control of data, warns Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software Foundation and creator of the operating system GNU.
The risks include loss of legal rights to data if it is stored on a company's machine's rather than your own, Stallman points out: "In the US, you even lose legal rights if you store your data in a company's machines instead of your own. The police need to present you with a search warrant to get your data from you; but if they are stored in a company's server, the police can get it without showing you anything. They may not even have to give the company a search warrant."
...He sees a creeping problem: "I suppose many people will continue moving towards careless computing, because there's a sucker born every minute. The US government may try to encourage people to place their data where the US government can seize it without showing them a search warrant, rather than in their own property. However, as long as enough of us continue keeping our data under our own control, we can still do so. And we had better do so, or the option may disappear."
"I'd say the problem is in the nature of the job ChromeOS is designed to do. Namely, encourage you to keep your data elsewhere, and do your computing elsewhere, instead of doing it in your own computer."
Please read full at Guardian
Steve Wozniak: 'We've lost a lot of control'
CNN - "All of a sudden, we've lost a lot of control," he said. "We can't turn off our internet; we can't turn off our smartphones; we can't turn off our computers."
"You used to ask a smart person a question. Now, who do you ask? It starts with g-o, and it's not God," he quipped.
Earlier that day, Wozniak said the biggest obstacle with the growing prevalence of technology is that our personal devices are unreliable.
"Little things that work one day; they don't work the next day," he said enthusiastically, waving his hands. "I think it's much harder today than ever before to basically know that something you have ... is going to work tomorrow."
Reciting an all-too-common living-room frustration, Wozniak told a story about the countless hours he spent trying to troubleshoot his media player, called Slingbox.
"There is no solution," Wozniak said of tech troubles. "Everything has a computer in it nowadays; everything with a computer is going to fail. The solution is: kill the people who invented these things," he said with a smile.
NPR on the future of the Internet, 1993
VIA boing2
17 years ago, Internet radio pioneer (and future rogue archivist) Carl Malamud and search engine inventor (and future Internet Archive founder) Brewster Kahle appeared on an historic segment of NPR's Science Friday to talk with Ira Flatow about the amazing future of the Internet.
Scientists from Xerox PARC helped them put this broadcast onto the Internet, and they even received call-ins from people on powerful Unix workstations at academic institutions with blazing-fast ISDN connections (which no doubt sent their sysadmins into a panic as the traffic across the campus routers spiked). Call-in guests asked how we'd manage the glut of information, how we'd figure out what was true, what you could do with your overstuffed email inbox, and, of course, how copyright would fare. Good times!
Science Friday, 1993: The Future of the Internet
World’s Fastest Supercomputer… Is Now In China
Nvidia- Tianhe-1A, a new supercomputer designed by the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in China has set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops, making it the fastest system in the world today.
I, Product
I tweet, therefore I am...
You may think of yourself as a user of Google, Facebook or Amazon, but you are actually their product.
Forget 1984 and Brave New World. The men who wrote those books were dangerously naïve and not as prescient as we once believed. Instead of Big Brother looking after us, we're immersed in a dizzily delightful system that cares so much about us that it anticipates our every pleasure, like a giant planetary-class Vegas, an immense, inexhaustible Disney World. All we have to do is to preserve the illusion that we, "the users," have the power: in that ignorance, we can live happily ever after.
Sure, Google will provide you with search results, but they are not in the search business; they are in the advertising business. Their profits come from marketing firms that buy your behavior.
Similarly, Amazon is not in the book business, although they will send you the books you've ordered. They are in the personal information business.
The assets of modern web-based companies are the intimate profiles of those who "use" them, like you and me. Time to forget the nice pronouncements like "Do no evil" that accompany the wholesale destruction of privacy now taking place on the web, or rather within the walled gardens that companies like Facebook, Google and Apple are erecting around us on the web. Compared to them, the Chinese censors re-inventing their Great Wall are a bunch of sissies.
Well, who cares? Look at what we've gained: We now have access to unprecedented new riches. Movies and songs by the thousands; new "friends" by the hundreds; timely pieces of data by the millions. Our lives have become richer, more intelligent, more interesting.
The world moves on. You may have had privacy rights as a customer or a user but what makes you think you should retain those rights now that you're just a product?
Read More at the Boing2
Wiretapping the Internet - To tech with IT all!
SCHNEIER On Monday, The New York Times reported that President Obama will seek sweeping laws enabling law enforcement to more easily eavesdrop on the internet. Technologies are changing, the administration argues, and modern digital systems aren't as easy to monitor as traditional telephones. 
...Formerly reserved for totalitarian countries, this wholesale surveillance of citizens has moved into the democratic world as well. Governments like Sweden, Canada and the United Kingdom are debating or passing laws giving their police new powers of internet surveillance, in many cases requiring communications system providers to redesign products and services they sell. More are passing data retention laws, forcing companies to retain customer data in case they might need to be investigated later.
Obama isn't the first U.S. president to seek expanded digital eavesdropping. The 1994 (CLINTON) CALEA law required phone companies to build ways to better facilitate FBI eavesdropping into their digital phone switches. Since 2001, the National Security Agency has built substantial eavesdropping systems within the United States.
These laws are dangerous, both for citizens of countries like China and citizens of Western democracies. Forcing companies to redesign their communications products and services to facilitate government eavesdropping reduces privacy and liberty; that's obvious. But the laws also make us less safe. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems with those capabilities built in.
Any surveillance system invites both criminal appropriation and government abuse. Function creep is the most obvious abuse: New police powers, enacted to fight terrorism, are already used in situations of conventional nonterrorist crime. Internet surveillance and control will be no different.
Please read more from the SCHNEIER
The Day The Data Died - Long live useless social networking
Newbies attack Microsoft between 7000 and 9000 times per second.
"When hackers crash Windows in the course of developing malware, they'll often accidentally agree to send the virus code straight to Microsoft, according to senior security architect Rocky Heckman. 'It's amazing how much stuff we get.' Heckman also said Microsoft was a common target for people testing their attacks. 'The first thing [script kiddies] do is fire off all these attacks at Microsoft.com. On average we get attacked between 7000 and 9000 times per second.'" Read more at /.
Teens addicted to texting like Heroin
cbs3.com - Teenagers are becoming addicted to texting, according to a new study. In fact experts are saying being hooked on texting can be like being addicted to drugs.
Walking, sitting, it doesn't matter where it happens, teenagers seem to need to text. Statistics show 80 percent of all 15 to 18-year-olds own a cell phone. And the rate of texting has sky rocketed 600 percent in three years. The average teen sends 3,000 texts a month
40 Critical Windows Bugs used to hijack & infect PC's with malware
ComputerWorld About 40 different Windows applications contain a critical flaw that can be used by attackers to hijack PCs and infect them with malware, a security researcher said Wednesday through iTunes bug...
HD Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7 and creator of the open-source Metasploit penetration-testing toolkit. Moore did not reveal the names of the vulnerable applications or their makers, however.
"The cat is out of the bag, this issue affects about 40 different apps, including the Windows shell,"
"Solving the flaw requires every affected vendor to produce a patch," he said. "
The bug in Apple in its iTunes... According to Apple, the bug does not affect Mac machines.
Moore confirmed that the flaw "applies to a wide range of Windows applications," and added that he stumbled across it while researching the Windows shortcut vulnerability, a critical bug that Microsoft acknowledged in July and patched on Aug. 2 using one of its rare "out of band" emergency updates.
Moore declined to name the applications that contain the bug or to go into great detail about the vulnerability. But he was willing to share some observations.
"The vector is slightly different between applications, but the end result is an attacker-supplied .dll being loaded after the user opens a 'safe' file type from a network share [either on the local network or the Internet]," Moore said in an e-mail reply to questions. "It is possible to force a user to open a file from the share, either through their Web browser or by abusing other applications, for example, Office documents with embedded content."
Some of what Moore described was reminiscent of the attacks using the Windows shortcut vulnerability. For instance, hackers were able to launch drive-by attacks exploiting the shortcut bug from malicious sites via WebDAV, and could embed their exploits into Office documents, which would presumably be delivered to victims as seemingly innocuous e-mail attachments.
His advice until the vulnerable applications are patched was also taken from Microsoft's shortcut bug playbook.
"Users can block outbound SMB [by blocking TCP ports] 139 and 445, and disable the WebDAV client [in Windows] to prevent these flaws from being exploited from outside of their local network," Moore recommended.
Both work-arounds were among those Microsoft told users they could apply if they were unable to apply the emergency update.
But although Microsoft was able to plug the shortcut hole with a patch for Windows, Moore was pessimistic that the company would be able to do the same with this vulnerability.
Please read full at ComputerWorld
National Park Service Says Tech Is Enabling Stupidity
SlashDot:
"The National Park Service... Last fall, a group of hikers in the Grand Canyon called in rescue helicopters three times by pressing the emergency button on their satellite location device. When rangers arrived the second time, the hikers complained that their water supply tasted salty. 'Because of having that electronic device, people have an expectation that they can do something stupid and be rescued,' said a spokeswoman for Grand Teton National Park. 'Every once in a while we get a call from someone who has gone to the top of a peak, the weather has turned and they are confused about how to get down and they want someone to personally escort them. The answer is that you are up there for the night.'"
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